The information on this website can be useful and it can be dangerous. There is content that can have a significant impact on our happiness and health. And sometimes, that impact is not positive.
Search engines seem to understand these risks and try to tailor SERP content in their own ways. Google has special algorithms to detect “potentially harmful” topics and apply special ranking requirements to them. These topics are called “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL).
What is YMYL?
Google introduced the concept of “Your Money or Your Life” in its Quality Rater Guidelnes , which are the group of people who help Google evaluate the quality of search results after certain algorithm changes.
According to this Guide, YMYL is the name given to topics that “… pose a high risk of harm because the content of these topics could have a significant impact on a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.”
Google requires the most thorough review of pages on YMYL topics to rank Page Quality. And so SEO teams need to do more work.
What is a YMYL topic?
There are several YMYL topic groups specified in this Guideline including: Health, Safety, Financial Security, Social, and Other.
Health
Health topics include information that may affect the physical, mental, and emotional health of a person or group of people. These topics often refer to health advice, medications, diseases, mental health, nutrition, etc. For example:
- How to apply back and neck pain reliever?
- Can I take vitamin C while pregnant?
- How to help someone who is having a panic attack
Safe
The topic of safety is closely related to the topic of Health. It covers content that can affect the online and offline safety of an individual or group of individuals. Safety topics include cybersecurity, protective techniques and equipment, risks and hazards in the workplace, etc. For example:
- How to Stay Safe on the Road: 8 Important Safe Driving Tips
- 18 Ways to Protect Your Device from Hackers
- How to stay safe in the sun
Financial Security
Financial Security topics can affect a person’s financial well-being or ability to support themselves and their family. Here you’ll find pages on investing, taxes, retirement planning, buying a home, paying for college, buying insurance, and more.
This topic group also includes pages and websites that allow users to make purchases, transfer money, pay bills, etc. For example:
- Top 10 Retirement Investment Strategies
- Real Estate for Sale in USA
- Best Private Student Loans September 2022
Society
Social topics can impact trust in public institutions or any other public interest. These topics include information about processes, policies, people, laws, government programs, social services, international events, business, politics, science, and technology. For example:
- Smith and Wesson sued by Highland Park shooting victim’s family
- History and Law of Elections and Elections
- 8 Government Regulations Business Owners Need to Know
Other topics
This group collects all other topics that may affect people’s happiness and health but do not fit into any of the groups mentioned above. These topics could be family, education, career, etc. For example:
- How to Choose the Right Career Path for You
- 10 Important Points to Consider When Buying a Home
- The Best Home Workout Equipment, According to Trainers
Now, let’s compare YMYL topics to non-YMYL topics to help you see the difference.
If you’re still in doubt about whether a topic is YMYL, ask yourself: “could the inaccurate content cause harm to a person or even a group of people?” If so, then the topic may be YMYL.
What are the requirements for YMYL content to rank highly?
Disclaimer: Google has not officially confirmed the use of a specific ranking signal for YMYL content. All of the advice listed below is the SEO community’s best guess.
There are several factors that Quality Raters use when evaluating YMYL content:
- Purpose of the Site
- Expertise, authority, reliability
- Quality and quantity of main content
- Website information/information about the person responsible for the content
- Website reputation/reputation of the person responsible for the content
These scores are clearly not ranking factors. However, they do give you an idea of what Google considers high-quality YMYL content to be. And SEOs have seen a clear increase in organic rankings after sites have been adjusted to the Quality Rater standards.
So now I’ll expand on each quality factor in detail and share some tips on how to improve rankings.
1. The page achieves its purpose
The purpose of a page is what the page is created to do. The page can be navigational, informative, educational, selling products and services, expressing opinions, entertaining, etc.
For YMYL content, what matters is how effectively the page achieves its purpose: there is enough content to convey the idea, the information is clear, nothing confuses the visitor, no disruptive ads and intrusive pop-ups, etc.
If a page fails to fulfill its purpose, it is considered low quality. That can mean a lower ranking.
2. High EAT
Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EAT) are factors that Google Quality Raters use to evaluate the overall quality of a website. These include:
- Expertise of the content creator.
- Authority of the content creator, the content itself, and the website.
- The credibility of the content creator, the content itself, and the website.
Some topics may be written by authors with little or no expertise (e.g. chicken seasoning, restaurant reviews, and home decor). But with YMYL, things are different. No expertise is allowed.
Google explicitly states that they require the highest EAT standards for YMYL pages for their text. How Google fights deliberately fake news:
In other words, For these “YMYL” pages, we believe that users expect us to operate with the strictest standards of trust and safety. Therefore, when our algorithms detect that a user’s query is related to a “YMYL” topic, we give greater weight in our ranking system to factors such as our understanding of the authority, expertise, or trustworthiness of the pages we present in response.”
Let’s take a closer look at what you should do in this regard:
Hire writers who are experts in the relevant field
Google’s John Muller once said , “ …sometimes it’s just little things like highlighting who’s creating better content, where it’s coming from, who’s reviewed it. Sometimes it’s bigger things like, if I’m writing about medical topics, maybe I should make sure I have a doctor or some real medical professional review that content…”
Therefore, we conclude that content creator expertise is important for YMYL topics.
If you can afford it, hire a professional to create your content. This should be someone with a medical degree if your content covers health topics. If you need a piece on global warming, hire a scientist to write it. In any case, find an expert in your relevant field.
It is best if the author is not a polymath. Your author can be an expert in a number of areas. However, as a rule, these areas should be related industries. The relevance of the author’s expertise is really important because it will determine how well your content will rank for keywords related to the niche.
Create an author page and add a bio
Although Google claims that this is not a direct ranking factor , the SEO community believes that having a separate author page is helpful. This page demonstrates the author’s expertise in the eyes of Google, thus increasing trust.
Describe the author’s professional background in detail (education, awards – anything relevant to the topic), if possible provide additional information (social media accounts, videos, PDFs, photos), add links to other articles and/or interviews, scientific works and anything else that can demonstrate experience in the relevant field.
Here’s an example of how the 1% Healthcare Project follows this advice:
However, if the content writer is not dedicated business intelligence database an expert, make sure your YMYL content is reviewed by an expert. Be sure to include everything that went into the creation of the content. Like this:
This is exactly what Google expects from YMYL pages, plus doing so will make readers trust you more.
Mentions on relevant niche platforms
In other words, It would be great if your author gets featured on other expert platforms. For example, the author could be a guest post on a trusted blog or a guest on some expert YouTube channels and on niche podcasts, etc.
A strong online presence demonstrates the author’s expertise and can never be misrepresented.
It would be great if in addition to being mentioned in the text or description for the video, your expert had a biography on this resource.
This bio can look like a photo and a short bio at the top or bottom of the page:
Improve Page Authority with PageRank
In How Google Fights Deliberately Fake News, Google states that PageRank is one of a handful of signals used to evaluate EAT:
“How do Google’s algorithms evaluate bi lists expertise, authority, and trustworthiness? Google’s algorithms identify signals about pages that correlate with trustworthiness and authority. The best-known signal is PageRank, which uses links on the web to determine authority.”
So focus on getting more backlinks from authoritative sources. After all, this is probably one of the first things Quality Raters will notice – they’ll be looking for mentions of your site on resources like Wikipedia, Forbes, and other authoritative sites.
Before starting a link building campaign , you need to check your website’s backlink profile and domain authority and compare them with your competitors. This will help you know how many backlinks you need to compete with your competitors and improve your rankings.
In SEO SpyGlass, go to Domain Сomparison > Summary , add your competitors and get a comparison chart with all the important metrics:
Then you need to uncover domains that link to your competitors but not to you – these are your potential customers.
From the Summary tab, go to Link Intersection and click Prospective Domains . You’ll get a list of domains that link to other YMYL pages. Pay special attention to domains with a high InLink Rank (a custom metric based on the PageRank formula) – these should be targeted from the start.
There are many ways to find backlink prospects that you can try, like with LinkAssistant, but I recommend focusing on competitors first. Why? This way, you can immediately find out what other successful YMYL sites are doing and borrow their strategies.
To make it a little easier, here is a sample prospecting link for quick and effective link building.
Remember: When running your link building campaign, try to get dofollow links because those are the ones that pass PageRank.
However, getting nofollow links from trusted sources is also helpful. While nofollow links don’t pass ranking signals, they can drive relevant traffic to your site and help build brand awareness.
Do not mix YMYL and non-YMYL content on the same website
When you have both YMYL and non-YMYL content on your site, this can confuse Google. Google may simply not know how to rank your site.
